It is with great pride and enthusiasm that we announce today a major collaboration between Bluelight.ru and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
Through the efforts of Brad Burge, MAPS’ Director of Communications, Rick Doblin, MAPS’ Founder and Executive Director, Sebastians_Ghost and The_Love_Bandit of Bluelight.ru, we will soon undertake an exciting partnership to reinvigorate the MAPS forum and increase opportunities for public education about psychedelic science and medicine. The existing plaintext email MAPS Forum will be migrating to Bluelight.ru, the world's leading drug information website. We're aiming to unveil the new MAPS Forums on Bluelight shortly before the Psychedelic Science 2013 symposium in mid April.

In the coming weeks, the MAPS Forum will no longer be linked from maps.org. Instead, we will work closely with Bluelight to encourage public participation in our new home at www.Bluelight.ru as the "transplant" of the MAPS community is completed.

Why Bluelight.ru?

Bluelight has offered to host the MAPS Forum as part of its ongoing and very successful work to facilitate the sharing of knowledge about the risks and benefits of psychoactive substances. Bluelight is the world's leading drug information website with approximately 18 million unique viewers a year. I encourage you to visit Bluelight.ru and explore its existing topics and forums. The MAPS Forums will reflect the multidisciplinary, collaborative nature of modern psychedelic science and medicine in addition to developments in psychedelic clinical trials and related treatment modalities.

By hosting a MAPS Forum on Bluelight, MAPS hopes to add to the wealth of conversations about the risks and benefits of psychedelics already present on Bluelight, sharing the legitimacy MAPS has achieved through our many years of hard work. It is also a major opportunity to increase awareness of MAPS, and of psychedelic science and medicine in general, by hosting a space where those discussions will be maximized: on Bluelight, rather than through continued plaintext emails that are increasingly unfamiliar to most Internet users.

Additionally, MAPS’ presence on Bluelight will drive much, much more Web traffic to Maps.org, giving us further opportunities to educate, inform, and inspire a large group of diverse people about the safer and not-so-safe uses of psychedelics. Additionally, we expect participation in MAPS’ Forums to dramatically increase.

What will happen to existing MAPS Forum threads?

An archive of the existing MAPS Forum will continue; the current plaintext MAPS Forum will remain in place. All current and archived threads will be moved to Bluelight's servers with anonymized emails. Any names included by the author in the original message will be included in the moved thread hosted on Bluelight.

Working titles of the MAPS Forums listed on the front page of Bluelight are tentatively:

MAPS Discussion
[threads about MAPS, events organized or sponsored by MAPS, and other issues about the organization, its work, history, strategy, and public service goals]

Clinical Psychedelic Research and Medicine
[threads about clinical and scientific research into the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana]

The existing MAPS Forum moderators have been invited to moderate topics in the new MAPS forums. Existing Bluelight moderators familiar with the topics included in the new forum group will direct relevant threads to the proper forums within this new section.

What do existing MAPS Forum members need to do?

If you would like to participate in the new MAPS-sponsored forums on Bluelight, or would like to sign up for Bluelight membership regardless, please visit www.bluelight.ru and register an account. When the MAPS Forums go live, there will be opportunities posted to moderate the new MAPS forums. Our goal is to encourage a staff representative of both original MAPS contributors and existing Bluelight staff.

If you would prefer to continue your conversations on the existing plaintext MAPS Forum, you may do continue posting by email; however, these threads will not be added to the new forum on Bluelight.

As we make this transition, the privacy of previous and current contributors to the MAPS Forum is our primary concern. As Bluelight operates using an anonymized identity for each user, no identifying information will be moved to Bluelight's servers, and no information previously inaccessible to search engines and/or restricted from public access will be made publicly available. If you would like to create a username that is not anonymous (such as jane_smith) you are welcome to do so.

Whether you've been participating for a decade or a month, thank you for contributing to the MAPS Forum. We are excited to take this next step, together. You're also welcome to write either of us at [email protected] or [email protected] with any comments, concerns, or feedback you might have.